The More Things Change…

She said she would initiate talks with the Free Democrats about forming a center-right coalition. Such a pairing would enable Merkel, 55, to tackle the contentious issue of overhauling the labor market in Germany, where companies complain about stringent worker protections that they say drag down business and competitiveness.

With the Free Democrats [a libertarian party with 15% of the vote] in her corner, Merkel also could try to halt the planned phase-out of nuclear power, another highly emotional issue in Germany, where a strong Green Party and many ordinary people oppose such plants.

And crucially for the United States, a new center-right coalition will probably be steelier in its continued commitment of troops to the war in Afghanistan, a deeply unpopular undertaking in Germany.

Screw the workers.

Screw the environment.

Screw the Afghans as the Germans and the Americans practice war on them and their wedding parties.

What is it about so-called conservatives that they arrogate to themselves the right to ride roughshod over the stated desires and needs of the people they rule? Merkel’s party got only about 34% of the vote.

Bush did it. Reagan did it. The raging wingnuts in the Senate and House would do it in a heartbeat should they get power: listen to them fulminate about regime change in Iran this week. McCain would be hurling bombs. The idiot Senators Kyl and Bond, soon to be joined by others of their ilk, are shouting ‘Regime change! Regime change!’ as loud as they can, succeeding most likely in uniting Iranians behind their murderous government, and demonstrating no concern at all for the potential cost in lives and money to the United States. Kyl and Bond are arrogant, narrow-minded, stupid men, good only at conning people to elect them to the Senate, where they contribute nothing to the country except discord and stupidity. And that holds true for pretty much most of the Republicans in Congress these days.

But that’s the Republican way. When change threatens to improve the country, they claw their way backward to the previous century or the one before that. One might hope that the current group claws itself all the way back under the slimy rocks whence they crawled to desecrate and foul American democracy. And maybe they can take Angela Merkel and her crew with them.

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Neo-conservatism seems to be less a political philosophy than a deeply scary mental derangement. What is with these people and the violence? When they’re not actually arranging for people to be killed in wars or in execution chambers, or authorizing torture in modern-day dungeons, they’re darkly hinting at taking up arms in civil insurrection and fantasizing aloud about assassinating political opponents, then crying “but it’s only a joke!”

I suspect there’s an Inquisition gene in the human genome. It’s like some Europeans who survived the Black Death and went on to breed: something in their genes increases resistance to HIV. Thus, Inquisitors who went on to breed passed on the killing/torture/war gene to McCain, Kyl, Inhofe (who has a large stupid gene too), Cheney, and the rest of them. And they also lost their humor gene.